The Breslin story

In 1848, one of my 7 Irish great-great-grandfathers John Breslin escaped the Famine with his first wife and son to eventually find their way to St. Louis, MO. It was there that tragically his first wife died, and he met and married my great-great-grandmother Catherine Keane, an immigrant from Kerry.

In St. Louis, they lived in an area called Kerry Patch, a neighborhood contemporary accounts called a "breeding ground for poverty, disease, and wandering orphans", made up of other Irish famine survivors. John and Catherine were lucky, though, to find themselves in St. Patrick's Parish, which was blessed with a priest with a vision. Wanting to alleviate the immigrants' plight, Fr. John Hogan raised money to buy land in the rolling, verdant hills of Southern Missouri so he could move his suffering parishioners to land that looked a lot like the home they had lost. He succeeded, and John and Catherine were among those lucky enough to move down into what is now known as The Irish Wilderness.

It wasn't easy, certainly. They had to travel 200 miles and then build their lives again from ground up. But they had once again found real neighbors who shared their history, their religion, their culture and land that could have been Ireland.

If only that were the happy ending. But they arrived there in 1859, and within a little more than a year, Missouri--especially southern Missouri--found itself immersed in the violence of the Civil War. Worse, they were close enough to the Confederate state of Arkansas that they were targeted by both the Confederate guerilla bands who hit and ran, and the Union army on their tails.

Guerilla warfare decimated the idyllic community the immigrants had sacrificed everything to build. John and Catherine lost everything except one mule. They and their children found themselves wandering the roads, once again homeless and hungry.

In the end, John supported his family by enlisting in the Union Army for $11 a month. Catherine and their children David, Ella, and my great-grandmother Margaret remained in Missouri's Arcadia Valley while John marched with his artillery unit. His 13 year old first son, John Henry, marched with him as a bugler.

John survived the war without injury, but after years living in the worst conditions as he fought with the army, he was left with an eye condition that put him in the hospital for nine months and worse, tuberculosis, or as it was referred to then, consumption. He spent the rest of his life struggling to make a living as a shoemaker and fighting for a reasonable pension, which at best ran to $8 a month, and died at 58. A hard, brave life lived, a good man remembered by his descendants.